Cue Availability Research Articles

Population coding of auditory space in the dorsal inferior colliculus persists with altered binaural cues.

Sound localization is critical for real-world hearing, such as segregating overlapping sound streams. For optimal flexibility, central representations of auditory space must adapt to peripheral changes in binaural cue availability, such as following asymmetric hearing loss in adulthood. However, whether the mature auditory system can reliably encode spatial auditory representations upon abrupt changes in binaural input is unclear. Here we use 2-photon Ca2+ imaging in awake head-fixed mice to determine how the higher-order "shell" layers of the inferior colliculus (IC) encode sound source location in the frontal azimuth, under binaural conditions and after acute monaural hearing loss induced by an ear plug ipsilateral to the imaged hemisphere. Spatial receptive fields were typically broad and not exclusively contralateral: Neurons responded reliably to multiple positions in the contra- and ipsi-lateral hemifields, with preferred positions tiling the entire frontal azimuth. Ear plugging broadened receptive fields and reduced spatial selectivity in a subset of neurons, in agreement with an inhibitory influence of ipsilateral sounds. However ear plugging also enhanced spatial tuning and/or unmasked receptive fields in other neurons, shifting the distribution of preferred angles ipsilaterally with minimal impact on the neuronal population's overall spatial resolution; these effects occurred within 2 hours of ear plugging. Consequently, linear classifiers trained on fluorescence data from control and ear-plugged conditions had similar classification accuracy when tested on held out data from within, but not across hearing conditions. Spatially informative neuronal population codes therefore arise rapidly following monaural hearing loss, in absence of overt experience.

Effects of availability of diagnostic and non-diagnostic cues on the accuracy of teachers’ judgments of students’ text comprehension

Accurately judging students’ comprehension is a key professional competence for teachers. It is crucial for adapting instruction to students’ needs and thereby promoting student learning. According to the cue-utilization framework, the accuracy of teachers’ judgments depends on how predictive (or diagnostic) the information (or cues) that teachers use to make judgments is of student performance. It is, however, unclear from prior studies if merely providing access to diagnostic cues aids accuracy, or whether this only helps if non-diagnostic cues are unavailable or ignored. Therefore, we investigated, using a within-subjects experimental design, the accuracy of secondary school teachers’ (N = 33) judgments of anonymous students’ text comprehension under four cue availability conditions: 1) non-diagnostic cues only; 2) diagnostic cues only; 3) a mix of diagnostic and non-diagnostic cues; and, 4) after an intervention informing them of the diagnosticity of cues, again a mix of diagnostic and non-diagnostic cues. Access to diagnostic cues enhanced teachers’ judgment accuracy, while access to non-diagnostic cues hindered it. While teachers’ judgment accuracy was not enhanced by the intervention (presumably because it was already relatively high), their diagnostic cue utilization increased, and non-diagnostic cue utilization decreased. In addition, teachers’ calibration increased after the intervention: They knew better when their judgments were (in)accurate. Furthermore, teachers were quite aware that diagnostic cues are diagnostic, but their awareness that non-diagnostic cues (especially students’ interest) are not, could be improved. These results could be useful in designing effective interventions to further foster teachers’ judgment accuracy.

Effects of binocular cue availability on leaping performance in Cheirogaleus medius: implications for primate origins.

Multiple competing hypotheses attribute the evolution of the suite of traits that distinguish primates from their closest relatives, including forward-facing eyes, which create a wide field of binocular vision, to specific behavioral and ecological factors. The grasp-leaping hypothesis suggests that the evolution of these traits in basal primates was driven by the demands of a form of leaping locomotion unique to primates. Whether the grasp-leaping hypothesis provides a viable mechanism for the evolution of primates' forward-facing eyes remains untested. To determine whether grasp-leaping locomotion may have contributed to driving the evolution of primates' forward-facing eyes, the importance of vision within the binocular field for this type of leaping was evaluated experimentally in Cheirogaleus medius, one of the cheirogaleid primate species considered reasonable living analogs of the earliest primates. Availability of binocular visual cues was experimentally restricted using a head-mounted blinder that narrowed the binocular visual field without altering the total visual field. Animals altered their launch behavior, reduced their horizontal leap speed, and were significantly more likely to select paths that offered the shortest available leaps when their binocular field was restricted. Restriction of binocular cue availability also significantly increased the probability of adverse landings even when statistically controlling for potentially confounding variables such as leap distance, horizontal leap speed, learning effects, etc. These results suggest a functional mechanism by which selection for improved grasp-leaping could also have contributed to the evolution of forward-facing eyes in the earliest crown primates.

Effect of binocular visual cue availability on fruit and insect grasping performance in two cheirogaleids: Implications for primate origins hypotheses

Forward-facing eyes with parallel optic axes, which provide a wide field of binocular vision and precise depth perception, are among the diagnostic features of crown primates; however, the adaptive significance of this feature remains contentious. Two of the most prominent primate-origins hypotheses propose that either foraging for fruit or nocturnal predation on insects created selective pressures that led to the evolution of diagnostic primate traits, including a wide binocular field. To determine whether either of these hypotheses provides a viable explanation for the evolution of primates' derived eye orientation, the importance of binocular depth cues for the two tasks invoked by these hypotheses was evaluated experimentally in Microcebus murinus and Cheirogaleus medius, cheirogaleids' considered reasonable living analogs of the earliest euprimates. Performance in grasping insects and fruit was evaluated when the animals made use of their full binocular visual field and when their binocular visual field was restricted using a helmet-mounted blinder. Restriction of the binocular field had no effect on fruit grasping performance; however, restriction of the binocular field resulted in a significant deficit in insect predation performance. Differences in behavioral variables also suggest that insect predation is a more visually demanding task than fruit foraging. These results support the role of insect predation, but not fruit foraging, in contributing to the selective pressures that led to the evolution of parallel optic axes and a wide binocular field in crown primates.

Expert goalkeepers' and coaches' views on anticipation and cue utilisation facing backcourt throws in handball goalkeeping.

Handball goalkeepers have to act under severe spatio-temporal pressure in both standardised (e.g., 7 m penalty) and non-standardised situations (e.g., backcourt throws) which require them to predict action outcome before ball flight is visible. So far, research on goalkeepers' cue utilisation for anticipation of an opponent's action has mainly focused on 7 m throw situations whereas little attention has been paid to the latter, more complex and far more frequently occurring backcourt throw situations. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with N = 6 expert handball goalkeepers and goalkeeper coaches [all of whom were (former) expert handball goalkeepers] on anticipation and cue utilisation when facing backcourt throws. The interviews were subsequently transcribed, coded and results were inductively as well as deductively categorised by means of a thematic analysis. Results reveal a variety of kinematic and contextual cues relevant for action anticipation that become available before the game and before or during the throw. Participants reported to use information from the offence (e.g., thrower's jump; opposing team's task distribution) and the defence (e.g., defensive players' strategies, block position) for anticipation in backcourt throw situations. Additionally, we identified several factors that influence cue availability and utilisation. Our findings provide a thorough basis to (a) guide future research that yields questions on kinematic and contextual cue integration and in-situ cue usage as well as (b) inform the development of training programs to foster goalkeepers' anticipatory skill.

Morphosyntactic predictive processing in adult heritage speakers: effects of cue availability and spoken and written language experience

ABSTRACTWe investigated prediction skills of adult heritage speakers and the role of written and spoken language experience on predictive processing. Using visual world eye-tracking, we focused on predictive use of case-marking cues in verb-medial and verb-final sentences in Turkish with adult Turkish heritage speakers (N = 25) and Turkish monolingual speakers (N = 24). Heritage speakers predicted in verb-medial sentences (when verb-semantic and case-marking cues were available), but not in verb-final sentences (when only case-marking cues were available) while monolinguals predicted in both. Prediction skills of heritage speakers were modulated by their spoken language experience in Turkish and written language experience in both languages. Overall, these results strongly suggest that verb-semantic information is needed to scaffold the use of morphosyntactic cues for prediction in heritage speakers. The findings also support the notion that both spoken and written language experience play an important role in predictive spoken language processing.

Toward a Greater Understanding of the Use of Nonverbal Cues To Deception in Computer-Mediated Communication

Background: Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is an important part of work life. However, this communication can be dishonest, and when people attempt to judge dishonesty, irrespective of the cues available, they tend to rely on a few nonverbal cues that are not the most reliable. Literature review: According to leakage theory, CMC modes differ from each other in the number of cues to deception they can transmit, potentially affecting one's ability to detect deception in a given medium. There is considerable research on peoples’ use of nonverbal cues across CMC modes to evaluate deception, but limited understanding of the choices they make and the extent to which their deception judgments are impaired or helped by cues they have access to for different CMC modes. Research questions: 1. To what extent are the nonverbal cues that people say they rely on to detect deception shaped by the medium that they use for communication? 2. What are the effects of nonverbal cue availability on deception detection success? Methodology: We conducted an experiment with 132 veracity judges from New Zealand and Jamaica, who observed interview segments in Spanish and Hindi (languages that they did not understand) to isolate the effects of nonverbal cues. They determined the veracity of each segment and listed the things that guided their judgment. Results/discussion: The results suggest that when certain nonverbal cues are available, such as gaze aversion, these suppress attention to more reliable cues (e.g., voice pitch) when judging deception. Redirecting attention to more reliable cues is therefore important. Unexpectedly, cue choice also varied across language by medium. Conclusions: The findings extend the understanding of people's use of nonverbal cues and the extent to which certain cues distract in the deception judgment. Although people rely on vocalic cues in audio-only media and kinesic cues in video-only media, they tend to rely mostly on, and are distracted by, a few kinesic cues for full audiovisual media, even though vocalic cues are available. We also found that people can successfully detect cues to deception, even when their communication mode is relatively bereft of useful information. However, the availability (or lack) of nonverbal cues was not a factor in deception detection success. To improve detection, deception training that targets reliable cues for different media is needed.

A study of individual differences in spatial use of captive sidewinder rattlesnakes Crotalus cerastes

Many species of vipers are known to use ambush sites repeatedly, a phenomenon presumably informed by chemical cues from prey. Experimentally, we limited chemical cue availability and recorded site selection in five captive-born sidewinders Crotalus cerastes during their first active season. Snakes showed individual differences among the study subjects in spatial movement across the season and repeatedly reused specific sites in their enclosures, suggesting spatial memory and individual differences in choices of resting sites. Individual variability in spatial- and object-use and associated memories suggests attention to such should be considered in developing husbandry routines for these captive individuals.

Effects of cue availability on primary school teachers' accuracy and confidence in their judgments of students’ mathematics performance

We investigated how the accuracy of teachers' judgments of their students' performance on procedural mathematical tasks, as well as their confidence in that, can be improved. Thirty-three primary school teachers judged how their students (N = 553) would perform on a multiplication and division task, with and without having access to performance cues (i.e., students' performance on similar tasks completed one week earlier). When available, teachers mostly seemed to base their judgments on performance cues. Availability of performance cues improved teachers’ judgment accuracy, resulted in higher confidence in their judgment accuracy, and increased awareness of their judgment (in)accuracy.

Effects of frequency-dependent spatial variation in soundscape settlement cues for reef fish larvae

The mechanisms that link reef soundscapes to larval fish settlement behaviors are poorly understood, yet the management of threatened reef communities requires we maintain the recruitment processes that recover and sustain populations. Using a field-calibrated sound propagation model, we predicted the transmission loss in the relevant frequency band as a function of range, depth, and azimuth to estimate the spatial heterogeneity in the acoustic cuescape. The model highlighted the frequency- and depth-dependence of the sound fields fishes may encounter, and we predict these complex spatial patterns influence how sounds function as settlement cues. Both modeling and field measurements supported a non-monotonic decline in amplitude with distance from the reef. We modeled acoustic fields created by sounds at frequencies from 2 common soniferous reef-based animals (snapping shrimps and toadfish) and estimated detection spaces of these sounds for larvae of 2 reef fish species. Results demonstrated that larval depth will influence cue availability and amplitude, and these spatial patterns of detection depend on cue frequency and the larval receiver’s auditory sensitivity. Estimated spatial scales of detection coupled with field measurements suggest cue amplitudes might allow some larvae to detect reef-based sounds at a range exposing them to the predicted spatial variation in the acoustic cuescape. In an individual-based model, cues available to even the shortest modeled distances improved settlement success. Our results emphasize the need to consider the frequency- and depth-dependence of the acoustic cues larval fishes encounter to increase understanding of the role of soundscapes in larval settlement.

No Evidence for Cross-Contextual Consistency in Spatial Cognition or Behavioral Flexibility in a Passerine

Although the evolution of cognitive differences among species has long been of interest in ecology, whether natural selection acts on cognitive processes within populations has only begun to receive similar attention. One of the key challenges is to understand how consistently cognitive traits within any one domain are expressed over time and across different contexts, as this has direct implications for the way in which selection might act on this variation. Animal studies typically measure a cognitive domain using only one task in one context and assume that this captures the likely expression of that domain in different contexts. This use of limited and restricted measures is not surprising because, from an ecologist’s perspective, cognitive tasks are laborious to employ, and if the measure requires learning a particular aspect of the task (e.g., reward type, cue availability, scale of testing), then it is difficult to repeat the task as the learning is context specific. Thus, our knowledge of whether individual differences in cognitive abilities are consistent across contexts is limited, and current evidence suggests that consistency is weak. We tested up to 32 wild great tits (Parus major) to characterize the consistency of two cognitive abilities, each in two different contexts: 1) spatial cognition at two different spatial scales, and 2) behavioral flexibility as performance in a detour reaching task and reversal learning in a spatial task. We found no evidence of a correlation between individuals’ performance in two measures of spatial cognition or two measures of behavioral flexibility. This suggests that cognitive performance is highly plastic and sensitive to differences across tasks, that variants of these well-known tasks may tap into different combinations of both cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms, or that the tasks simply do not adequately measure each putative cognitive domain. Our results highlight the challenges of developing standardized cognitive assays to explain natural behavior and to understand the selective consequences of that variation.

Modeling Input Factors in Second Language Acquisition of the English Article Construction.

Based on the Competition Model, the current study investigated how cue availability and cue reliability as two important input factors influenced second language (L2) learners' cue learning of the English article construction. Written corpus data of university-level Chinese-L1 learners of English were sampled for a comparison of English majors and non-English majors who demonstrated two levels of L2 competence in English article usage. The path model analysis in structural equation modeling was utilized to investigate the relationship between the input factors and L2 usage (frequency and accuracy of article cue production). The findings contribute novel and scarce empirical evidence that confirms a central claim of the Competition Model, i.e., the changing importance of cue availability and cue reliability in the frequency and accuracy of production. Cue availability was found to determine L2 production frequency regardless of level of L2 competence. Cue reliability was the input factor that differentiated competence levels. When learners stayed at a relatively lower L2 proficiency, cue reliability played an important role in influencing L2 frequency of usage rather than accuracy of usage. When learners developed increased exposure to and stronger competence in the target language, cue reliability played a significant role in determining learners' success of cue learning. The study is methodologically innovative and expands the empirical applicability of the Competition Model to the domain of second language production and construction learning.

Communicative efficiency and differential case marking: a reverse-engineering approach.

The use of differential case marking of A and P has been explained in terms of efficiency (economy) and markedness. The present study tests predictions based on these accounts, using conditional probabilities of a particular feature given the syntactic role (cue availability), and conditional probabilities of a particular syntactic role given the feature in question (cue reliability). Cue availability serves as a measure of markedness, whereas cue reliability is central for the efficiency account. Similar to reverse engineering, we determine which of the probabilistic measures could have been responsible for the recurrent cross-linguistic patterns described in the literature. The probabilities are estimated from spontaneous informal dialogues in English and Russian (Indo-European), Lao (Tai-Kadai), N||ng (Tuu) and Ruuli (Bantu). The analyses, which involve a series of mixed-effects Poisson models, clearly demonstrate that cue reliability matches the observed cross-linguistic patterns better than cue availability. Thus, the results support the efficiency account of differential marking.

Access to semantic cues does not lead to perceptual restoration of interrupted speech in cochlear-implant users.

Cochlear-implant (CI) users experience less success in understanding speech in noisy, real-world listening environments than normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Perceptual restoration is one method NH listeners use to repair noise-interrupted speech. Whereas previous work has reported that CI users can use perceptual restoration in certain cases, they failed to do so under listening conditions in which NH listeners can successfully restore. Providing increased opportunities to use top-down linguistic knowledge is one possible method to increase perceptual restoration use in CI users. This work tested perceptual restoration abilities in 18 CI users and varied whether a semantic cue (presented visually) was available prior to the target sentence (presented auditorily). Results showed that whereas access to a semantic cue generally improved performance with interrupted speech, CI users failed to perceptually restore speech regardless of the semantic cue availability. The lack of restoration in this population directly contradicts previous work in this field and raises questions of whether restoration is possible in CI users. One reason for speech-in-noise understanding difficulty in CI users could be that they are unable to use tools like restoration to process noise-interrupted speech effectively.

Hippocampus and cortex are involved in the retrieval of a spatial memory under full and partial cue availability

Retaking routes after a period of time usually occurs in an environment which has suffered from spatial configuration modifications. Thus, the original visual stimuli that allowed us to establish cognitive mapping using an allocentric strategy during the acquisition phase may not remain physically identical at the time of retrieval. However, in the standard experimental paradigms the cues are typically maintained constant. In this study, we explored memory retrieval with spatial modifications from learning in the Morris Water Maze. We trained rats on a reference memory protocol with five cues placed on black curtains that surrounded the pool, and seven days later, we tested memory retrieval under different conditions: maintenance of the five cues, removal of two and four of them, and the addition of three extra ones. Under full-cue and partial cue-conditions, rats showed successful memory retrieval, whereas adding extra cues resulted in impaired retrieval. Furthermore, we assessed brain oxidative metabolism through cytochrome c oxidase (CCO) histochemistry and found that, under full- and partial-cue conditions, there is an enhancement of the hippocampal, prefrontal, retrosplenial, parietal, and rhinal cortex metabolism. Rats that failed to retrieve spatial information in the extra cues condition showed similar or lower CCO activity than controls across many limbic areas. It is suggested that the presence of a partial portion of visual stimuli from learning makes it possible to reactivate the entire memory trace, but extra spatial information hinders retrieval, making it difficult to disengage the novel information from the older knowledge and establish a contextual generalization.

The McGurk effect in the time of pandemic: Age-dependent adaptation to an environmental loss of visual speech cues.

Seeing a person's mouth move for [ga] while hearing [ba] often results in the perception of "da." Such audiovisual integration of speech cues, known as the McGurk effect, is stable within but variable across individuals. When the visual or auditory cues are degraded, due to signal distortion or the perceiver's sensory impairment, reliance on cues via the impoverished modality decreases. This study tested whether cue-reliance adjustments due to exposure to reduced cue availability are persistent and transfer to subsequent perception of speech with all cues fully available. A McGurk experiment was administered at the beginning and after a month of mandatory face-mask wearing (enforced in Czechia during the 2020 pandemic). Responses to audio-visually incongruent stimuli were analyzed from 292 persons (ages 16-55), representing a cross-sectional sample, and 41 students (ages 19-27), representing a longitudinal sample. The extent to which the participants relied exclusively on visual cues was affected by testing time in interaction with age. After a month of reduced access to lipreading, reliance on visual cues (present at test) somewhat lowered for younger and increased for older persons. This implies that adults adapt their speech perception faculty to an altered environmental availability of multimodal cues, and that younger adults do so more efficiently. This finding demonstrates that besides sensory impairment or signal noise, which reduce cue availability and thus affect audio-visual cue reliance, having experienced a change in environmental conditions can modulate the perceiver's (otherwise relatively stable) general bias towards different modalities during speech communication.

No Evidence for Cross-Contextual Consistency in Spatial Cognition or Behavioral Flexibility in a Passerine

Although the evolution of cognitive differences among species has long been of interest in ecology, whether natural selection acts on cognitive processes within populations has only begun to receive similar attention. One of the key challenges is to understand how consistently cognitive traits within any one domain are expressed over time and across different contexts, as this has direct implications for the way in which selection might act on this variation. Animal studies typically measure a cognitive domain using only one task in one context and assume that this captures the likely expression of that domain in different contexts. This use of limited and restricted measures is not surprising because, from an ecologist’s perspective, cognitive tasks are laborious to employ, and if the measure requires learning a particular aspect of the task (e.g., reward type, cue availability, scale of testing), then it is difficult to repeat the task as the learning is context specific. Thus, our knowledge of whether individual differences in cognitive abilities are consistent across contexts is limited, and current evidence suggests that consistency is weak. We tested up to 32 wild great tits (Parus major) to characterize the consistency of two cognitive abilities, each in two different contexts: 1) spatial cognition at two different spatial scales, and 2) behavioral flexibility as performance in a detour reaching task and reversal learning in a spatial task. We found no evidence of a correlation between individuals’ performance in two measures of spatial cognition or two measures of behavioral flexibility. This suggests that cognitive performance is highly plastic and sensitive to differences across tasks, that variants of these well-known tasks may tap into different combinations of both cognitive and non-cognitive mechanisms, or that the tasks simply do not adequately measure each putative cognitive domain. Our results highlight the challenges of developing standardized cognitive assays to explain natural behavior and to understand the selective consequences of that variation.

Limits on transfer learning from photographic image data to X-ray threat detection.

X-ray imaging is a crucial and ubiquitous tool for detecting threats to transport security, but interpretation of the images presents a logistical bottleneck. Recent advances in Deep Learning image classification offer hope of improving throughput through automation. However, Deep Learning methods require large quantities of labelled training data. While photographic data is cheap and plentiful, comparable training sets are seldom available for the X-ray domain. To determine whether and to what extent it is feasible to exploit the availability of photo data to supplement the training of X-ray threat detectors. A new dataset was collected, consisting of 1901 matched pairs of photo & X-ray images of 501 common objects. Of these, 258 pairs were of 69 objects considered threats in the context of aviation. This data was used to test a variety of transfer learning approaches. A simple model of threat cue availability was developed to understand the limits of this transferability. Appearance features learned from photos provide a useful basis for training classifiers. Some transfer from the photo to the X-ray domain is possible as ∼40% of danger cues are shared between the modalities, but the effectiveness of this transfer is limited since ∼60% of cues are not. Transfer learning is beneficial when X-ray data is very scarce-of the order of tens of training images in our experiments-but provides no significant benefit when hundreds or thousands of X-ray images are available.

Shifting between response and place strategies in maze navigation: Effects of training, cue availability and functional inactivation of striatum or hippocampus in rats.

Response and place memory systems have long been considered independent, encoding information in parallel, and involving the striatum and hippocampus, respectively. Most experimental studies supporting this view used simple, repetitive tasks, with unrestrained access to spatial cues. They did not give animals an opportunity to correct a response strategy by shifting to a place one, which would demonstrate dynamic, adaptive interactions between both memory systems in the navigation correction process. In a first experiment, rats were trained in the double-H maze for different durations (1, 6, or 14days; 4 trials/day) to acquire a repetitive task in darkness (forcing a response memory-based strategy) or normal light (placing response and place memory systems in balance), or to acquire a place memory. All rats were given a misleading shifted-start probe trial 24-h post-training to test both their strategy and their ability to correct their navigation directly or in response to negative feedback. Additional analyses focused on the dorsal striatum and the dorsal hippocampus using c-Fos gene expression imaging and, in a second experiment, reversible muscimol inactivation. The results indicate that, depending on training protocol and duration, the striatum, which was unexpectedly the first to come into play in the dual strategy task, and the hippocampus are both required when rats have to correct their navigation after having acquired a repetitive task in a cued environment. Partly contradicting the model established by Packard and McGaugh (1996, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, vol. 65), these data point to memory systems that interact in more complex ways than considered so far. To some extent, they also challenge the notion of hippocampus-independent response memory and striatum-independent place memory systems.

Sight in a Clique, Scent in Society: Plasticity in the Use of Nestmate Recognition Cues Along Colony Development in the Social Wasp Polistes dominula

Nestmate recognition, i.e., the ability to discriminate nestmates from foreign individuals, is a crucial feature of insect societies, and it has been traditionally considered to be predominantly based on chemical cues. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests a relevant plasticity in the use of different communication channels according to cue availability and reliability in different contexts. In particular, visual cues have been shown to influence various types of social recognition in several social insects, but their role in nestmate recognition is still under-investigated. We tested the hypothesis of plasticity in the use of visual and chemical recognition cues in the primitively eusocial wasp Polistes dominula, in which the availability and reliability of recognition cues vary across the colony cycle. Indeed, before the emergence of workers, P. dominula colonies are rather small (one to few individuals), and the variability in the facial pattern might allow resident wasps to use visual cues for nestmate recognition. After workers' emergence, the increase in the number of colony members reduces the reliability of visual cues, thus leaving chemical cues as the most reliable nestmate recognition cues. We thus predict a differential use of chemical and visual cues along colony life. We experimentally separated visual and chemical cues of nestmates and non-nestmates and presented them alone or in combination (with coherent or mismatched cues) to resident wasps to test which communication channel was used in the two stages and, in case, how visual and chemical cues interacted. Our results show, for the first time in a social insect, the differential use of visual and chemical cues for nestmate recognition in two different phases of colony, which supports the hypothesis of a plastic, reliability-based use of recognition cues in this species according to the different colonial contexts.